I agree that the pyramid part is definitely one of the coolest parts of any instance. Of the instances I’ve been through, only the Opera and Chess Battle in Karazhan have been more fun for me.
The rest of ZK is pretty dull, imho, but it makes up for it in that part.
One of the NPCs will open the door for you. One of them will help you complete a quest. If you do the quest first, you probably won’t be able to get the door opened, so think before you go talking willy-nilly.
The goblin will blast the door. If you talk to Bly first, you’ll have to fight the whole group for the Divino-matic Rod
After a night of wipes, hard mode Hodir went down.
If you want to get started in raiding, talk to people in raiding guilds. We run an alt run on the weekend, and we’ve geared up some pugs and even most of a 10 man guild as well as our own alts. And while not all of us are willing to talk to people, most of us enjoy what we do, and like to talk about the game and our classes. Just make sure we’re not actually on a progression run at the time.
I can’t speak for other guilds, but gear is easier to fix than anything else. If you have an odd spec, but you can explain why, that’s cool, if you “just like it” not so much. If you stand in the fire every fight, well, once it kills you you’re not helping. If you don’t know the fights, at least having seen a video or two, that’s 5 minutes of pulls and flasks lost while we explain it to you.
The only grinding we care about is Sons of Hodir for your shoulder chant and who ever sells your main spec head chant. Professions need to be high enough to give their bonuses, maxxed is nice, but not required.
**aktep **got this mostly right, but…
I’m almost certain that the goblin runs off when you start the fight with the other NPCs I remember him shouting “I’m outta here!” and dashing off, blasting the door to the boss on his way.
Hahaha, I think you just named my two least favorite parts of Kara.
And grats, Redwing!
I’m tearing my hair out, I’m getting so sick of Naxx. Hopefully people are finally getting geared enough that we can get in some serious Ulduar progression soon… But the RL is prioritizing Naxx25 over Uld10 now (we skipped last night what was supposed to be our first Ulduar run past FL to work on a Naxx25 run we’d started Tuesday, ARGH). I mean, I can understand that he wants to gear more people up and keep more people involved… but c’mon, some of us were Ulduar-ready the second it dropped, and we’re getting sick of running the same fights over and over, with no direct benefits to us because we have better gear already, just mounting repair fees as some moron who can’t be bothered to do five minutes of research does something stupid for the 50th time.
… Whoops, sorry, [/rant].
I guess I’m fond of those two because they remind me of when I first started in Kara with my old guild.
They did a betting pool before the opera event every time we raided. I never won it. Everyone would put it maybe a gold, or whatever on what play they thought would be involved and the people who picked the right play would split the pool. Plus we were lucky and didn’t get the wolf that often. Little Red Riding Hood was by far the toughest of the plays for us, followed by Wizard of Oz. Romeo and Juliet we did real well on.
And for the Chess Event, everyone had to play as a pawn in their first Karazhan run with the group. It was kinda their initiation. I guess its Nostalgia and the fact that we never lost that made me like it.
Shade of Aran was always the one I hated. As the least-well geared healer of our bunch, I was always one bad manuever away from dying in there. I was barely over the recommended 8000 hp after buffs. I had to learn to heal using my instant heals (Circle of Healing I think, its been a while) while dashing across the room to a wall, and then other times stopping on a dime during flame wreath. Tons of people were constantly at low health.
I enjoyed raiding with them but when they went to 3 days I decided I couldn’t keep up with them anymore and still fulfill rl commitments and visit family. They were going to Friday/Saturday/Sunday raiding.
Fri/Sat/Sun? Ugh. No wonder you stopped raiding with them.
I know the feeling. I may actually run BT again if someone asks :). If your group can drop KT/Maly/Sarth+2 you’ll be able to to drop FL, XT, likely Ignis, and maybe IC. Auriya can be painful if your tanks aren’t ready for it. Kolagon is cake if you can coordinate your group. There’s no need to go from 25 Naxx into 10 Uludar. I’ve actually never done a 10 man run of it.
Are you at least doing 25 man vault for the free gear? Assuming you have, you’ll see at lot of that dps target switching in Uludar, Kolagon, Freya, Mimiron require it, Hodir is made much easier with it, and Yogg has multipule hit this, now that, back to this mechanics. Great fight though.
Out of curiousity what server are you on?
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Kara, ah sweet badge runs, how I hope you’ll never return. Early on I hated Nightbane because the guild I was in had issues keeping threat on him. Other than that, Oz sucked, because I spent most of it casting searing pain on the Scarecrow, which meant I had to go find it and put it somewhere useful on my cast bars.
I do have a soft spot for Currator though. He was the first boss I fought that felt like something more than an overpowered 5-man fight.
Resto druids are made of win, especially that awesome little tree dance. 
You can have your boomkin dance, guys, but I’m calling dibs on the tree.
I’m finding that the few raids I’ve been on so far have been a blast. Readjusted my BM spec, pulled out my faithful raptor instead of the corehound, and now I’m keeping up with the DKs and enhance shammie at the top pretty well, which pleases me.
Last night, though, the shammie and I swam out to Alcaz Island just to see what was there, and dear good little dancing gods. Dr. Weavil. :eek::eek: Little bastard hits HARD.
We’ve got two teams running Naxx10 now (and we’ve got a potential third starting this week), which is why the GM/RL picked Naxx25 over the scheduled Uld10 run (we had two teams online, so we could do a Naxx25 run with ~20 people instead of a Uld10 run with the 10 people chosen for that). It’s not that we’re going Naxx25 → Uld10, we’re just now getting enough 80s and the right schedule to *do *25-man. So, the RL wanted to go into Naxx25, where we could kill more bosses and get gear for more people, than do a progression run, spend a lot of time wiping, and get gear for half as many people, at best.
We don’t run VoA much because the timing of it is such a pain–we’re not even really scheduling Naxx25, just running 25 instead of 10 when we’ve got two full teams on. It’s a pretty new guild, and the raiding only started when transfers opened up and a bunch of us were able to bring our mains over, so things are still coming together.
Naxx10 isn’t a problem anymore, at least on runs where we’re not bringing someone in who’s new, undergeared, a moron, doesn’t speak English, etc. I don’t know if the guild’s gotten Sarth+2D down yet, but for sure we always do at least +1 on the OS runs I’ve done with them.
I’m on Borean Tundra now (Sleutel, <Appareo Fatum>). Originally of Eldre’Thalas, and spend about a month on Arygos trying out a raiding guild there that didn’t work out before coming to BT to join this guild (started by an old highschool friend of my pocket healer).
I’m not worried about the gear on our tanks (being that I’m in almost all 213/226 epics and our GM/RL is also in a lot of 213s IIRC). Our healers and DPS are gearing up, but some of them still have a ways to go, and we’ve just now had enough healers hit 80 that we’re getting a solid number of them available, and they’re not all… the best at what they do, shall we say. We’ve got some really solid DPS, but again some more who need work. There are some DPS classes we could use a few more of, too–especially Shadow Priests, Warlocks, and Hunters.
Get the Teldrassil Sproutling pet from the Argent Tournament (if you’re Alliance, you’ll have to champion Darnassus, and if you’re Horde, you’ll have to wait for someone to throw it up on the AH). It’s a miniature version of the tree form (with a slightly different color scheme), and one of its idle animations is the dance.
As a member of a progression guild, a night spent wiping and getting a small handfull of loot is fine with me :D.
I’m on Shattered Hand (Tarr <Evade>).
We’ll take VoA whenever. It’s not part of our loot rules, just free rolls, but it makes a nice break from deliberately wiping on Hodir again and again and again.
Healers are everything in Uludar. Raid damage is everywhere, and most bosses spike the tank as well. The fights are some of the best I’ve seen, though the nerfs are sucking some of the life out of it. Vezax (we’ve not yet tried hard mode with him) is still a thrilling fight even though it’s now a given.
I got my pally carried through 25Naxx her first couple of runs, but it’ll be awhile before that’s possible in Uludar. Fortunately, she’s geared enough now that I think the alt run will be able to get through some of the siege bosses.
As someone pushing hard-modes in a pretty tightly knit 10-man group, I’d recommend that anyone who wants to start Ulduar give it a shot. I think they’ve done a great job on the instance; the basic fights themselves are almost all of the type that depend on performance rather than gear. There’s only one single boss in the place that I’d call a gear check, and he’s buried deep inside at second to last, by which time you’ll be geared out anyway.
These aren’t fights that are rendered suddenly easier by having 2k more HP on the tank, or having 50 more mana/5 on your healers, or what have you - it’s far more determined by how good you are at reacting to events, and using the mechanics of the fight. As an example, Hodir might pump out an awful lot of AOE damage, but it becomes vastly easier to deal with when your healers are standing in the haste moonbeams, and your tank has positioned him near a toasty fire, so you shave two minutes off the kill time due to amplified DPS, or, heaven forbid, actually use some frost resistance.
I wouldn’t want to walk in there with greens or anything, but if you’ve gotten your gear list out of heroics, you’re good to go IMO. Hard modes are a different story, as they usually have an extra twist to the fight as well as Kicking It Up A Notch, but they’re something you do AFTER you’ve mastered the basic fights, not something you start with.
I finally made it, y’all!
Got 5 tusks
5 tough condor meats and
5 crispy Spider whatever’s.
It took me a while because my damn bags kept filling up with the wrong spider-shit, and I kept having to sell it (VERY CAREFULLY), but I finally turned in my Goulash Quest for the recipe and some applause from those buxom Buxettes! 
Also, I keep picking up these “Guardian Angels” who help me when I’m being triple-teamed, and that’s a very cool thing. (Elves and Mages, mostly)
Also, I wanted to say that I like using my thunder-clap when I get double or triple teamed because it seems to stun them and gives me time to get back to “heroic strike” and finish them off. I just step back a little and then hit it…
I’ve been on for two hours now and haven’t had to be repaired yet.
Hell, I know I’m not doing this right (or “by the book”), but if I lived closer to Julian (my grandson) I bet the two of us could kick some ass!
Thanks
Quasi
… Sentinel Hill just got attacked, and as me and Wolkie were in the uh… virginity, puttin’ the moves on Heather, the Innkeeper at the Sentinel Hill Inn, we just decided to jump into the fray, died and got rezzed by a kind Elf!
Not a bad night’s work, if ah do say so mah own self!
I love role playing, kids.
Can ya tell?
Taking the hint from Jas09 and Shot from Guns, I decided rather than try to leap into raiding, I should actually do the instances of Northrend first (though I’m running them all non-heroic first to get the layout down). I ran a non-heroic Gundrak today (since when I logged in today, that’s what the PUG was looking for). We didn’t have anyone who wanted to tank though, so instead of healing, I, not specced for it, had to bear-tank.
It actually went off fairly well. Most of the time I was able to keep the focus of the mobs on me (though seriously, bears only have like two actions that could taunt (challenging roar and growl), with one on a semi-long cooldown, or command attention other than attacks it seems—am I missing something there?) and we only had one close call wherein I (stupidly) had my back towards a cliff overlooking water and got knocked back into the water. I was down to 700 health but managed to pop lifeblood? (herbalism bonus) and survival instincts in time to survive long enough to get back in range of the pally who was doing the healing. We made it through the rest of the instance with no other mishaps and no deaths. It was kindof fun, though if I decide to tank, I’ll have to focus on yet another wholly different talent spec, I think.
Growl and Challenging Roar are panic buttons that are not needed if things are going perfect(unless there is some special mechanic in the encounter), neither one does anything to mob that is already attacking you.
The two most important bear abilites for trash tanking are Swipe and Maul, both hit multiple mobs(need a glyph for Maul to do that) and generate extra threat. Or, well, pretty much all bear abilities generate extra threat but Swipe and Maul are what you’ll be spamming until your fingers fall off. 
If you want to tank in heroics or raids later you’re going to need a proper tanking spec, that will give you more survivability and buttons to push.
Incidentally, some of the higher-level non-heroic dungeons have nice quest rewards associated with them - I upgraded about 5 of my blue northrend quest rewards after my run through normal Gundrak, though there were a couple drops involved there, too.
The primary means for bears to hold aggro is via damage. Thus, as Mogle mentioned, Maul and Swipe are going to be primary threat-generating abilities (especially for the WotLK standard AoE tanking), but all of your damage abilities, such as Mangle (which you need to be specced Feral to get) and Lacerate will also cause high threat.
Believe me, it’s what I’d rather be doing, too. :\
I think that’s an exaggeration. Your DPS aren’t going to burn things down fast enough, your tanks aren’t going to have enough HP/avoidance/mitigation, and your healers aren’t going to be healing enough with just Heroic and even rep gear. Not to mention, anybody coming straight out of Heroics probably isn’t going to have the experience raiding to be able to quickly pick up on the strategies and movement required. Much better to start with the lower-level raids (Naxx and OS) where the learning curve won’t be as high.
As people have mentioned, taunts are ohshti buttons to be used only in an emergency–they’re not supposed to be your primary way of keeping aggro. Check out the WoWWiki entry on threat–it includes threat tables for every class. Check out the Druid one to see which abilities will cause the most threat. Pay special attention to which ones will hit multiple targets (and how the threat will be divided). You can also check the mouseover tooltips on your abilities–look for things that say “and causes a high amount of threat.”
For you and anyone else interested in tanking… WoW Insider also just put up an article linking a whole bunch of tanking guides and information.
Just hit 23, bought myself another talent (arms) and am rarin’ to go!
Q